About Judith Braun

Part of the “guerrilla” generation of feminist artists who rose to prominence in the 1970s and ’80s, Judith Braun began her career with provocative depictions of female genitalia, including her own. However, she’s best known today for her sprawling, mandala-like drawings made with just the use of charcoal and her fingers. “It makes sense that Judith Braun...once made paintings of angels,” Roberta Smith once wrote. “This is because it is hard to believe that the exquisite drawings in her current exhibition were made by human hands. They have a kind of perfection and innocence that seems untouched and that certainly has nothing to do with machines.” With an extraordinary mix of skill, determination, physical endurance, and discipline, Braun crafts giant landscapes and swirling biomorphic abstractions, alive with spiritual energy and lightness that belies the labor-intensity of their creation (which often leaves Braun with blackened hands). “Abstraction keeps the images free to be anything, while the symmetry resolves that fluidity into something, like liquid energy crystallizing,” she says.